With gene editing, can society achieve immortality?

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The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis.

Within my lifetime, it seems inevitable that genome production and gene-editing will eliminate many congenital diseases and even abate the aging process itself. Within your lifetime, if you are under 30, molecular biologists may be promising not just longevity, but immortality.

So we will be the last to die: Generation Death.

[T]he Harvard Medical School, invited a minister to offer a Christian perspective on recent advances in genetic technology.

Does cutting-edge genomic research desecrate God? [the minister] asked. Does it dehumanize people and treat them as common objects? He further argued that so-called germline editing…“will dehumanize our offspring by causing us, as parents, to be ontologically superior to them; our children would be ‘made’ rather than ‘begotten.’ ”

“Socrates’ observation that ‘All men are mortal’ might be politically unfashionable, but it is still accurate,” [disagreed] Father John Paris [on Generation Death]. “Americans have this idea that ‘death is an option,’ and that there’s going to be salvation and immortality through medicine. I don’t know anybody who isn’t going to die.”

Read full, original post: Will we be the last generation to die?

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